"Hey, we want our allies in the Democratic party to win in spite of coming off of an unpopular presidency, so let's hobble the Republicans by promoting the absolute worst one we can find. That will surely never come back to bite us in the rump!"

Voting in the primary of the other party is definitely prone to chicanery, sure.

My main preference for approval is that it opens up more options. I don't think it'll really solve any sort of political mayhem, not entirely. That's the nature of people. However, sheer numbers means it's harder to screw with everything. More viable candidates ought to help in the long run. That's true within parties as well.

Which system is this? It looks like you're dissing approval voting, but the example looks more like ranked choice. In approval voting, C (the universally hated candidate) would only have one vote. A and B would split the rest of the votes, including (if it's there) the approval from the C voter, and that is the desired outcome in this case.

Ranked choice has variants in which you must rank all choices. Most voters don't know the bottom candidates well enough to rank them, and probably don't need to.

Tyndmyr wrote:If you vote for preferences other than your real ones, and as a result, you get what you voted for, you probably employed poor strategy.

Only en masse, and only if it was possible to elect your real preference in the first place. Individually, you are still at the mercy of the rest of the population.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Heartfelt thanks from addams and from me - you really made a difference.

"Hey, we want our allies in the Democratic party to win in spite of coming off of an unpopular presidency, so let's hobble the Republicans by promoting the absolute worst one we can find. That will surely never come back to bite us in the rump!"

I tried to find another source but seems like the daily mail has the lead on this one for now. Article details an upcoming book written by a former stenographer who produced transcripts for Obama's press pool.

Lots of neat - unfiltered - insights into the life of a press pool worker.

I haven't searched for a source for this yet, but I do seem to recall there being some allegations on the republican side in 2016 that there were some democrats crossing the aisle in primary season to vote for/against trump so that it would be an easy win for Hillary in the general election (or conversely to stop trump).

Ok. I didn't want to post this without at least doing some looking. Most of what I found was garbage posts on facebook or silly ask the expert type websites where people were asking if that was a viable strategy.

CNBC did a little bit on why trump was doing better in open primaries than in closed caucuses. After reading the article it reminded me of why I thought there were these allegations. It was because Cruz was complaining about how he was doing so well in closed primaries and caucuses but then in open primaries Trump and Kasich seemed to do better. He postulated that Democrats were crossing over to stop ted cruz and spoil the primary.

In hindsight, I think the conclusion CNBC came up with, that Trump was winning over blue collar registered democrats in the rust belt is far more likely. A lot of people failed to see this coming. I think if Hillary's team had identified this possibility earlier they may have focused more on those one time reliable blue counties - turned red in 2016 parts of ohio / wisconsin and pennsylvania.

I bet there is a fivethirtyeight post about this but I wasn't able to find one quickly.

I mean, I'll cop to registering as a Republican to vote against Trump in the primaries, but that wasn't out of pro-Hillary feeling, and I certainly didn't vote for her in the general. Being anti-Trump and being pro-Clinton are correlated, but they're definitely not identical.

I do think there was a great deal of scrambling for convenient answers to explain Trump that didn't require any actual change. Both on the Republican side for the primary, and on the Democrat side later.

Without trying to delve too much more into the 2016 election (I don't want to take over this thread, there are other threads for such discussion)....

I think there was a lot of "soul searching" going on at that time to help try and explain away the reasons for Trump's rise. I think if we reflect back now we can see what was happening. That's the beauty of hindsight.

There were a lot of idiots in the media who wanted to find something rational about the rise of Trump, rather than face the gritty reality that they are responsible for allowing right-wing propaganda to create an environment where a large chunk of the country will believe any conspiracy theory about Democrats, while brushing off any criminal wrongdoing by Republicans as attacks by the so-called liberal media.

In practice, they gave Trump an absolute crapton of media coverage. Oh, sure, they might not have liked him much, but the ol' saw about there being no such thing as bad publicity is not entirely wrong. I do think the sheer quantity of media coverage helped him rise. Likewise, the media's tendency to focus on awfulness has definitely caused a bunch of issues, some of which are related to Trump's rise. I mean, they use rules like "if it bleeds, it leads", and then act surprised that people overestimate the prevalence of crime and look for a solution.

Yeah, the democrats could have run a better candidate, but the media is definitely up to their ears in responsibility as well.

Well, one thing we didn't know until now was that whoever did the graphic for Attachment H was either a different person than the one who did the graphic for Attachment G or used a different keyboard for each attachment. Attachment H has a distinct lack of the lowercase letter L.

If you like Call of Cthulhu and modern government conspiracy, check out my Delta Green thread.Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments.

I had to go back and look. There must have been a scaling issue with that graphic because the letter " I " is also missing in DIRECTION in the legend box.

I am slightly curious what is contained in the classified attachment.

I am not so surprised that there was really no new information gained in this report. It seems as though a report that, in small part, criticized leaks, was in itself, already leaked.. Thought I will allow that many of this information had been released to congress. And it's pretty clear congress can't keep a secret.

That is awesome. It's too bad olivine is so prevalent in nature (especially so on the Hawaiian islands.. for obvious reasons). Would still be really cool to wake up and have a bunch of crystals all over your yard. Though also slightly terrifying to realize how close you are to the danger.

Makes me also wonder about alien landscapes and how another world might experience these types of events. Or those articles that talk about planets that rain diamond etc.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

(I bear in mind the above example of under-description, pity it didn't show up on my past-posts list for me to edit it in light of complaints elsewhere… I came here just now only to post the following that is the opposite of Darker Side news, and yet not Humorous. So…)

Between 2015 and 2016, the number of Americans nonfatally injured by a firearm jumped by 37 percent, rising from about 85,000 to more than 116,000. It was the largest single-year increase recorded in more than 15 years.But the gun injury estimate is one of several categories of CDC data flagged with an asterisk indicating that, according to the agency’s own standards, it should be treated as “unstable and potentially unreliable.”

Tldr the CDC has larger margin of error on guns and drowning due to intense regional variation combined with limited sample size. The MOE doesn't affect their other data. It's convenient to access so researchers are using it even when other data sets say otherwise.

Fuck. Researchers need to use reliable data. But I get it, often I look up the easiest to find answer instead of the rigorously correct one. It's going to be a problem until the CDC spends more money on more samples or people use other datasets, or other agencies become as easy to get as the CDC.

sardia wrote:Fuck. Researchers need to use reliable data. But I get it, often I look up the easiest to find answer instead of the rigorously correct one. It's going to be a problem until the CDC spends more money on more samples or people use other datasets, or other agencies become as easy to get as the CDC.

The CDC could spend more money on sampling but I think the right way to do this is to standardize reporting requirements and gather much fuller datasets by baking it into the data requirements for digital medical records and require every hospital to submit injury counts by cause. I know some things might be hard to classify but firearm injuries aren't one of those and anything that is hard to classify isn't going to become less accurate if you have every hospital reporting it. Sampling from a group of entities that are already being required to produce digital records seems like an outdated methodology to me.

With the CDC, there’s this general assumption that they are reliable and have good data.

Any researcher that just uses data without looking at margins of error and the sources own disclaimers should probably find another field of work.

'37% increase.......We asked the commission about the single-year jump of 31,000 gun injuries, and a spokesperson replied, “Although visually, the [CDC] estimates for firearm-related assaults appear to be increasing from 2015 to 2016, there is not a statistically significant difference between the estimates.”'

Tyndmyr wrote:'37% increase.......We asked the commission about the single-year jump of 31,000 gun injuries, and a spokesperson replied, “Although visually, the [CDC] estimates for firearm-related assaults appear to be increasing from 2015 to 2016, there is not a statistically significant difference between the estimates.”'

Yeah, their numbers are pretty much worthless.

This statement only applies to Numbers for drowning and firearms only. Apparently, some of the hospitals are by the water, hence the high rate of drownings. It's a similar situation for guns, probably have them in Chicago and other Urban environments. It'll take time for the CDC to respond to the problem. First they have to realize they have a problem. I'm reminded of that one black Trump supporter in a poll skewing the numbers of projected black voters for Trump.

sardia wrote:This statement only applies to Numbers for drowning and firearms only. Apparently, some of the hospitals are by the water, hence the high rate of drownings. It's a similar situation for guns, probably have them in Chicago and other Urban environments. It'll take time for the CDC to respond to the problem. First they have to realize they have a problem. I'm reminded of that one black Trump supporter in a poll skewing the numbers of projected black voters for Trump.

Sure, only worthless for those categories, but still...folks are apparently using those numbers anyways. Sure, there's a responsibility for researchers to actually research before posting articles and such, but there's also a certain responsibility to provide good data in the first place.

I mean, it's nice that we've finally concretely demonstrated what the pro-gunners have been saying for years, but we'd be far better off without the bad data being used everywhere.

I have to say, this seems like the right decision. However much I disagree with the bakers' views (i.e. totally), I think they ought to have had the right to refuse an order to bake a cake bearing a message that they disagreed with. I don't know what the situation is regarding printers and sign writers, but I presume they can turn down an order if the content goes against their political beliefs -- though it's probably bad for business. And this was a bakery - political messages would not be exactly the core of their business.

It's also relevant that the bakers' views were in fact in agreement with the law of the land, which remains unchanged to this day "thanks to" the DUP (though the suspension of the Stormont assembly can't have helped).